This page is no longer being updated and remains online for informational and historical purposes only. The information is accurate as of the last page update.
For questions about page contents, contact the Communications Division.
Diane Cole Ahl, Rothkopf Professor of Art History, has been granted three academic fellowships for this summer and next school year, which she will use to research and write her next book.
The awards will take her to Venice and Florence, Italy, as well as Princeton, N.J. while she spends her upcoming sabbatical working on Picturing the Renaissance: Painting in Fifteenth-Century Italy, which is under contract to Yale University Press.
From June 12- July 15, Ahl will be one of 15 college and university professors exploring Venice in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar,Shaping Civic Space in a Renaissance City: Venice c.1300 to c.1600. Her project involves investigating Venice as a site of pilgrimage and exploringthe city’s association with Byzantium in the fifteenth century.
She has also been granted membership to the prestigious School of Historical Studies at The Institute for Advanced Studyin Princeton, N.J. The institute, which was founded in 1930, is one of the world’s leading centers for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry and boasts Albert Einstein as one of its founding faculty. It is comprised of a community of scholars guided by permanent faculty who provide support for its members’ research. Ahl will spend the fall semester using the institute’s libraries, facilities and resources.
Finally, she will continueher work while spending February and March 2007 as a research fellow at Kunsthistorisches Institut (Art History Research Institute) in Florence, Italy. Opened in 1897, it is one of the most distinguished institutes dedicated to the study of Italian art in the world.
Not only is Ahl’s upcoming scholarship impressive, but the book itself will take an unprecedented approach toward Renaissance painting.
As the title denotes, the topic is 15th century Italian Renaissance painters. While the theme may not sound out of the ordinary, the way Ahl is tackling the subject is.
Instead of focusing on the great artists and their works, as many other books have done, Ahl will write about how painting helped bring about change.
“The book will explore social environments and show painting as an active agent of shaping society,” says Ahl.
She will also discuss how Renaissance art highlights the interaction of dynamics between people of different classes and look at how certain paintings and images responded to and influenced religious, civic, and domestic life.
Ahl believes her research and travel will pay dividends in the classroom.She plans to offer a new course focusing on Venetian art and culture during the Renaissance.
Ahl has taught at Lafayette since 1977. She is the author of Benozzo Gozzoli, named an Outstanding Academic Book of 1997 by CHOICE, the publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, and co-awarded the 1998 Otto Gründler Prize for Best Book in Medieval Studies at the International Congress on Medieval Studies. She has also edited a groundbreaking collection of essays on an influential Florentine painter of the early Renaissance, The Cambridge Companion to Masaccio; edited a book on Leonardo da Vinci’s Sforza Monument Horse; co-edited a book on Italian Renaissance confraternities and their art; and has written dozens of articles and reviews in scholarly journals.
Her most recent publication, Fra Angelico, about the 15th century Florentine Dominican friar and painter, is currently at press and will inaugurate a new series on art history from Phaidon Pressin London.